Bitcoin’s onchain transaction count has climbed to its strongest level of 2026, a near-record pace not seen since late 2024 — yet the economic value behind those transactions tells a different story, according to a research note published by CryptoQuant last week.
Daily Bitcoin transactions have surpassed 800,000, more than doubling from lows recorded in 2025 and approaching the peak levels seen during the 2023–2025 bull cycle. The network’s activity index has broken above trend for the first time since December 2024, sitting just 7% below its all-time high activity levels recorded in September 2024.
“This above-trend reading has been sustained for several weeks and marks the first positive activity regime since mid-2024, contrasting sharply with Bitcoin’s ongoing bear market price decline,” CryptoQuant wrote in the note.
The catch: the transactions driving that surge are tiny. Cohorts of less than 0.01 BTC and less than 0.001 BTC now together account for roughly 80% of all daily Bitcoin transfers — up from around 44% in 2023. “The economic content of these transactions differs materially from prior high-activity periods,” the firm noted.
Bitcoin’s protocol-driven activity
CryptoQuant attributes the shift to protocol-driven activity: Ordinals, Runes, BRC-20 tokens, and data timestamping services that rely on Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN field, a transaction output that allows users to attach arbitrary data to a bitcoin transaction. The removal of OP_RETURN’s byte limit last year following a contentious community debate opened the door to a surge in this kind of usage. “Usage has spiked to near-record levels in 2026,” the firm wrote, describing these protocols as generators of “high volumes of dust-value transactions.”
The result is rising mempool congestion. According to FXStreet’s coverage of the note, the Bitcoin mempool expanded to around 128,000 pending transactions at the time of writing — its highest level since late February 2025, with congestion concentrated among low-fee transactions. CryptoQuant warned that “sustained expansion could drive fee increases for time-sensitive economic transactions.”
The divergence between network activity and price is stark. Bitcoin is trading around $64,700, down roughly 17% over the past 30 days and nearly 50% below its October 2025 record of $126,080.
High transaction counts in prior cycles correlated with rising prices and economic demand; this time, the volume reflects protocol use rather than a surge in financial transfers.
For now, the network is busy — just not with the kind of activity that has historically moved the price.